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How do we know for sure that a team’s cars are identical? (41 posts)

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katederby said 6 months, 4 weeks ago:

@raymondu999 Well you can take a guess as to what Webber was feeling at the time but it can only be a guess. I don’t see how anyone can assume from the clip that he didn’t want the wing for himself but didn’t want Vettel to have it either. Webber makes it clear in his book on the 2010 season that events that day affected him adversely and ran over to Sunday.

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Toro Stevo said 6 months, 4 weeks ago:

This does remind me though, after Webber won Monaco in 2010 Vettel had a bit of a moan about his chassis. They examined it and found some ‘fault’, and stuck him in a different one. Webber’s one was also found to have similar ‘faults’, but Webber having won the last two races thought it was wiser to keep it.
After Webber totalled it at Valencia, he was given Vettel’s old chassis which had the cracks fixed, and won 2 out of the next 3 races. So there you go, maybe there is something in this? He did say:

http://en.espnf1.com/redbull/motorsport/story/22378.html

“There was nothing wrong with it,”, “It’s fine. It’s all we’ve got anyway,”

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raymondu999 said 6 months, 4 weeks ago:

@katederby Yes it’s one of the missing pieces of the puzzle. Webber was very pissed, whereas the day before he was pretty chipper about it, given that he preferred the old wing anyways.

@toro-stevo To be honest, in motorsport, when there is something like “oh yeah there was a hairline crack on the chassis which showed up on the ultrasound” that’s basically a nothing.

The new chassis is basically a confidence upgrade. The mind is a powerful thing – they do the chassis swap so the driver is told that the new chassis is better, and he goes out, and his subconscious mind reaffirms “Oh yeah, this feels great!”

Remember Kimi’s chassis update coming into Spa 2009? Or some time around then. The chassis was just about still the same. Even F1 drivers are humans – they’re susceptible to peaks and dips in confidence, which directly affect their performance.

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Toro Stevo said 6 months, 4 weeks ago:

@raymondu999
Oh yeah, it was pretty obvious that it was Seb’s confidence rather than a chassis problem. Fragile egos these sportsman have. I couldn’t help laughing though when Webber then beat him in the same ‘cracked’ chassis (through more luck as pace really) in 2 out of the first 3 races he raced in it.

There’s obviously enough similarity in the chassis for Webber to slip into Vettel’s old chassis, contrary to what I said before. Or at least enough money for them to make adjustments for his longer frame to fit into it. A luxury not available for tall guys at smaller teams.

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Michael said 6 months, 3 weeks ago:

How funny is this?

2013 Parts in Lewis’s car

No wonder Alonso had paid someone to check his car at McLaren. Probably about time that Lewis did the same.

McLaren’s behavior is unbelievable – they are not even worth discussing.

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raymondu999 said 6 months, 3 weeks ago:

@freelittlebirds If I may – I think you’re overreacting slightly. There is nothing wrong with that, and actually – it’s not a rare event. It’s just that this is one of the rare occasions that the news has made it onto the press. As such, I don’t believe there is any malicious intent within.

This is very standard practice because it serves several different purposes. Given the blind nature of the test, there’s one of two possibilities:
a) Lewis is told about the upgrade, just that he’s not told WHAT is upgraded
b) Lewis is completely blind about the upgrade.

In both cases, the team will have their telemetry and data to see the actual numbers and see if the parts are an improvement on track. Both are standard practice even with a driver that is NOT leaving the team.

In the case of option A, Lewis then goes on to the run without any psychological expectations of what to expect (ie he won’t be expecting additional stability through Turn 10/11 for example). As such he will just be feeling on the fly what the upgrades have done, and this blind feedback is very useful. For example, the team could install a new diffuser, and have the expectation that they have better mid-corner stability. But in this “hey we have an upgrade but we won’t tell you what it is” run, the driver then says “there’s SO much oversteer mid-corner” then that tells you something is wrong. If the driver were TOLD to expect mid-corner stability, then he might not give the same feedback to the team about the test part.

In option B, it’s a similar scenario. So say we have the same diffuser upgrade. Lewis goes out and does the test. He comes back in “wow you guys. The car is so oversteery mid-corner.” Then the team knows there is something wrong with the upgrade.

The lack of any preconceived assumptions can benefit the team a lot, because it removes any self-justifying feelings. Drivers, for example, are also often given confidence upgrades where they “receive” a new part but actually don’t. Kimi in Spa 2009 for example received an update to his chassis which reportedly had a lighter weight, which meant he could run ballast lower for a lower CofG, contributing to better stability. Guess what happened to his results that weekend…

Also, given that Lewis is moving to a new team, there aren’t any details he can bring to the other teams. This is less useful in aero tests because you can generally see aero upgrades (new front wing, new diffuser, etc gets photographed VERY quickly)

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Michael said 6 months, 3 weeks ago:

@raymondu999

I can see your point to some extent and a lot of people felt that way in the comments. My opinion is that if there are upgrades to the car, the responsible thing is to tell Lewis or any driver for that matter that there are upgrades. Lewis is going out there and driving at 190 mph and he needs to be aware that there are changes to the car – it’s criminally irresponsible not to say that.

They don’t need to go into detail and provide a full schematic on a usb port that he can hand to Mercedes – they can just say, “Hey, Lewis we’re running some updates for the 2013 car which we expect to affect such and such. We know you’re going to Mercedes, would you mind testing them today and giving us your feedback?”

If they don’t trust him, then they can just run the upgrades on Button’s car only.

Beyond being unsafe, to do what they are doing is just plain insulting to any driver or professional individual, much less a WDC champion.

This is only going to hurt McLaren in the long run because they have lost Alonso for good and they will lose Lewis for good the way things are going. I honestly wonder if Kimi would ever drive for them given a choice to drive for another team without the bad blood.

They also risk alienating Mercedes the way they are acting especially since Lewis will be there over the next 3 years and any insult towards Lewis past or future is automatically an insult to Mercedes. If I’m not mistaken, I think McLaren needs Mercedes a lot more than Mercedes needs McLaren…

Not to mention the fans who are going down at a record pace…

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raymondu999 said 6 months, 3 weeks ago:

@freelittlebirds It’s nothing about trust – it’s about getting blind feedback. It’s like when you have a guy put a blindfold, then taste a $50 wine against a $500 wine. Only then can you get a true comparison.

Every team on the grid does this practice – this just got sensationalised by the media because of Lewis’ move, that’s all

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Michael said 6 months, 3 weeks ago:

@raymondu – I was reading a recent interview with Fernando Alonso who’s complaining about the abundance of talking about updates and the lack of actual updates. Obviously the team must sit down with the drivers and discuss all the upcoming updates. If you discuss an update, it’s impossible for the driver NOT to actually know that this update has made it to the car.

I don’t think we can compare F1 to wine tasting as losing control of the car due to a faulty update can have dire consequences. With wine, you may get acid reflux at worst:-)

I also think it would be much more logical for a driver to be aware of any updates so that they can try to determine if the car actually is doing better in the area that the update was supposed to address and relay that information back to the team. Just my own personal opinion.

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raymondu999 said 6 months, 3 weeks ago:

@freelittlebirds Here, see this:

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Michael said 6 months, 3 weeks ago:

@raymondu999

Yes but Sam Michael’s interview is a lot of damage control isn’t it? He’s essentially come out and said that they made zero updates this weekend after a 2 week break. McLaren has had a 0% chance of winning in the past 3 races and felt that the best path to victory was to make no updates other than changing the radius of an insignificant part? Is Lewis supposed to scare the Red Bulls off the track to win?;-)

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